In recent years the Canadian government has adopted unilateral sanctions against a host of countries including Venezuela, China, Russia, Nicaragua and others. Sanctions constitute a form of collective punishment and could be considered a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention. This begs the question: does Canada’s unilateral sanctions regime violate international law?

Chinese and American leaders are now playing a game of chicken that couldn’t be more dangerous for both countries and the planet. Isn’t it time for the new Biden administration and its Chinese opposite to grasp more clearly and deeply that their hostile behaviors and decisions could have unforeseeable and catastrophic consequences?

On March 1, 1954, the United States military detonated a 15 megaton thermonuclear weapon called “Bravo” (the first in the “CASTLE” test series) and exposed the residents of the Bikini Atoll to its radioactive fallout. Those down-wind of the explosions suffered severe burns and were exposed to massive amounts of radiation, irreversibly altering the trajectory of the region and its inhabitants forever.

Two of America’s best songwriters released new albums during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first was Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, a deep-dive into the sickness of American society. The second is Lana Del Rey’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club. Over eleven new songs and one cover, Del Rey presents a starkly different image of America and what it means to exist, navigate, and create in these difficult and confusing times.

It is hard to imagine any credible political perspective on the left that isn’t hostile to US-led imperialism. However, there is more to be considered than the geopolitical map and the actions of governments. We live in a world in which working class people face exploitation and oppression and in which they take to the streets to challenge those conditions.

A renewed détente with Cuba, as well as a recommitment to the JCPOA, seemed like two common-sense policy adjustments for the Biden administration to make if it wanted to return to Obama’s already deeply inadequate approach to Cuba and Iran. Now, instead of trying to reassemble the fragments, Biden is burying those Obama-era victories once and for all—and Canada is welcoming their abandonment.

We must learn to resist China’s dispossession and discrimination against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities as part and parcel of a global movement against racial subjugation, colonialism, police brutality, surveillance, and incarceration. Only then will we be able to realize that working-class interests transcend borders, regardless of what the elites in our respective countries keep telling us.

The arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was a colossal blunder by the Trudeau government, executed at the request of the now almost universally discredited Trump administration, which blatantly admitted that she was being held hostage as a bargaining chip in the former president’s trade war with China. Canada should release Meng and chart a new course for relations with China—before it’s too late.

On the fortieth anniversary of Reagan’s inauguration, it is worth contemplating the lasting effects of his administration’s policies on communities throughout the United States. No Country for Old Men presents this shift as a modern reincarnation of the inhuman brutality and rugged individualism of the Wild West. With today’s unprecedented socioeconomic inequality, it is an analysis that grows only more prescient with time.

Societal breakdown, which is looming, brings with it grotesque political distortions. Trump was a symptom of this breakdown. He was not the disease. This dystopian future, one that will probably end in the United States in a form of Christian fascism, has been bequeathed to us by the ruling global elites, who in another era would have been found promenading through the halls of Versailles or the Forbidden City.